


Songs in the Key of Red

by fanfoolishness (LoonyLupin), LoonyLupin



Series: Character Studies (Dragon Age) [6]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Dark, Dragon Age Quest: In Hushed Whispers, F/M, Gen, Red Lyrium, Red Lyrium Cullen, Redcliffe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 08:38:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4780859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoonyLupin/pseuds/fanfoolishness, https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoonyLupin/pseuds/LoonyLupin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Commander Cullen is captured in the Inquisition's last attempt to take Redcliffe Castle and rescue the Herald.  But the song of red lyrium proves inescapable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Songs in the Key of Red

They find him on the battlefield, grasping hands trailing over him, nothing like a lover’s.  They touch him with hands that burn.  Are they singing?  He hears a song…  

They pull at his shattered shield arm, push at his cracked ribs, their faces jagged red blurs above his.   _To the victors go the spoils_ , Cullen thinks in a haze of pain.  He coughs, his body spasming; he feels blood fleck his lips, tastes the iron, feels it rattle in his throat.  He will die like this, the last of the Inquisition’s soldiers broken against the walls of Redcliffe Castle, his blood spilling into the Fereldan earth like so much water.  The green sky boils above him, mocking the way he lays there in the boot-churned mud.  They had thought they could save the world.  What fools they’d been.

He slips into unconsciousness, thinking  _Forgive me_.  He has failed.

But he does not die.

 

* * *

 

The smell of magic, that crackle and flare of ozone, sears his nostrils.  He jolts awake, panting, unsure of where he is.  It is too dark to see.

There are voices, soft and ashamed, in his ears.  He almost fancies they’re apologizing to him.  Were there still humans here in Redcliffe Castle?  The spies had told him something terrible was happening to the people here, to the mages who’d doomed them all, but these voices sound like people.  Yet the voices falter in the end, stuttering away into silence.

Magic roils over him, mending some wounds, easing others.  He will live.  And for what?

He lifts his head, struggling, still weak.  He sees the bars of a prison cell, the backs of the healers as they leave him.  Cullen is only able to glimpse them in the dim light of a hallway torch, but there’s something  _wrong_  with them, the way they move, it isn’t natural –

He falls back into uneasy dreams filled with broken singing, his heartbeat far too strong.

 

* * *

 

The days bleed into each other, time a bitter flood he cannot staunch.  Cullen tries to count them, tries to mark the wall of his cell with a chip of stone, too small to make into a weapon.  The stone crumbles, and through the pieces flaking down the wall, he sees a faint sheen of red oozing through the cracks.  He stops trying to mark the walls.  But the coming days blur like smoke, and the red changes from a sickening sheen on the sandstone to spikes and jutting peaks of raw red lyrium.  It grows inexorable, and he cannot stop it.  He mutters the Chant but knows it wards against nothing here.

His hands hurt always now.  It was like this before, wasn’t it, when he stopped the lyrium?  It is difficult to remember; last year seems so long ago.  Back then it was the burden of withdrawal, shooting pains to the tips of his fingers, the intricate muscles clumsy, his hands shaking with cold even on a summer’s day.

Now his fingernails are bloodied, ragged from tearing at the stone of his cell, digging at the floor.  His hands are swollen, throbbing, useless; they are only good for ripping at the red lyrium spilling out of the wall so that he can fling chunks of it out of his cell and into the hall, trying to get it as far away from him as possible.  It keeps growing.  He keeps digging.  The red song in his ears stirs forgotten remnants of lyrium in his blood and it whispers to him of power, of strength, of his pain relieved.

Cullen knows it lies.  He sees red templars patrolling the cells, sees the way their faces twist in a hollow agony.  He will not take it.  He will not.  It is a mantra that becomes as familiar to him as the Chant.  He will not take it.  But he fears in the down deep of his heart and gut that the creeping red lyrium will find a way to take  _him_.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes he dreams, lying on his side curled up on the ground, shivering in the rags that used to fit a much more muscular man.  He is withered now, muscles tight and atrophied despite the exercises he attempts in his five by five space, and when he curls up to sleep he makes a much smaller figure than he did months ago.

The dreams bring no comfort.  Whether that is due to the voice of red lyrium soughing in the background, or the shame he feels at his failure, he does not know.

_“We will hold the line, Commander,” Josephine tells him, her mouth thinning in a cold look he has never before seen on her face.  She looks strange, clad in armor with her hand trembling around a dagger’s hilt.  He knows what it costs her to take up arms, what demons lie in her past, and he grieves the necessity of it.  She should not bear this burden.  At her side, Cassandra and Vivienne tend to their weapons.  Behind them Chantry sisters and Mother Giselle kneel in vigil, praying to Andraste.  They have not evacuated, for where would they go?  Nowhere is safe._

_He opens his mouth to speak in protest – it can’t be right, to empty the garrisons in their last attempt to break Redcliffe, leaving Haven nearly defenseless against the Breach and the demons swelling from the gash in the sky.  But they have agreed.  It is their last chance to rescue Leliana and the Herald, if they still live.  And if it requires sacrifice –_

_Cassandra lays a hand on his arm.  “This is our choice, Cullen.  We will be your vanguard.  You must get to Redcliffe with as many soldiers as you can, and we will stop the demons from following.  Do not back down now.”_

_Vivienne’s eyes are steely.  “Maker watch over you, Commander.”_

_He echoes the words, but they are ashes in his mouth._

He stirs fitfully in his sleep.  They are all dead now, of course.  Haven fell months ago.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes they haul him out of his cell.  He fights them every time, collecting scars.  The broken nose.  The gouged knuckles.  The dislocated shoulder.  He wishes now he’d learned more when he was a templar of hand-to-hand combat.  The absence of his sword and shield is a loss he cannot measure.  

His attempts at fighting are nothing like they used to be.  In the beginning he was headbutts and dirty kicks, frantic bolts for the hallway, punches with the whole of his weight behind them.  He’d killed one of them, he’s certain, pushed the plate of the man’s nose into the brain with a headbutt and left him limp on the ground.  But he’d never managed to get a weapon.

He resists as much as he can, tries to shove one of them into the cell.  Another grips him like a bear, strong arms flecked with red lyrium crystals crushing Cullen’s chest.  A year ago he could have taken the man, he knows it.  

His body’s not his own anymore, though, half-starved and shrunken, and they clap him in irons easily.  His ears ring with a song he knows isn’t real, weaving through his thoughts thin and scratchy.  He hears it more and more.

“Don’t know why you bother,” he says in the croak his voice now inhabits.  The sound cuts through the song.  “I’ve still nothing to tell.”

The guards do not answer him, despite the fact that he says the same thing every time.

Cullen ignores the questioning, when it comes.   _Where is the Herald?_   He laughs at the question as he always does.  Why would they ask something so meaningless?

 

* * *

 

The Chant of Light fails him.  Everything fails, if he’s honest.  He used to sing the verses often in the quiet of his cell, familiar passages like a balm against the truth, but the words ring more and more hollow every day, every week, every month.

His memory betrays him, too.  He used to be sharp, used to be clever.  He had a good memory once; the Chant lived there (not the whole thing, Maker, no, but every part that carried meaning for him, he kept with him), bits of history, poetry, old stories and new.  Later he could keep the rosters for the Inquisition within his head, soldiers and troop movements, resources and battle maneuvers.  It was all there once.  He reaches out a hand, lays it against the red wall.  Bits of lyrium growing in the back of his hand glint viciously.

He can’t get away from it, not from the way it springs from the walls of his cell, the way flakes of it are ground into the meager bits of food and water, the way the powder of it hangs heavy in the air he breathes.  The song is there all the time now; no longer thin and thready, it’s bright and brassy, shimmering, shivering.  It’s louder and bolder than real lyrium ever thought to sing.

It’s hard to think past it.  The song makes his head spin, makes it throb with the effort of holding the music.  It’s so much larger than himself.

The only verses of the Chant he remembers now are the Threnodies.  They seem fitting, falling from his cracked lips.  He licks them, tongue dabbing at the blood at the corners of his mouth.  For a moment the words slide through the song.  Just a moment.

_And so is the Golden City blackened_

_with each step you take in my Hall._

_Marvel at perfection, for it is fleeting._

_You have brought Sin to Heaven_

_and doom upon all the world._

Cullen picks at the lyrium in the back of his hand, gouging at it with his fingernails.  A sheet of skin peels from the area, blood oozing at the edge of the lyrium.  Beneath the hank of dead skin he sees only crumbling red.  The sight makes his heart stutter.  He whispers to himself, closing his eyes tightly.

_Bodies so maimed_

_and distorted that none should see them_

_and know them for men._

 

* * *

 

Time is nothing, nothing, nothing, endless loop sliding past him, no day, no night, only this cursed  _singing, singing_  –

 

* * *

 

He isn’t hungry anymore.  It doesn’t bite at him, doesn’t tear at him.  He’s hollow inside and he’s filled with red, sanguine tendrils slithering into his heart and his belly and his mind.  It’s hard to move, the way it coats him from the inside out, but he inhales the song, and he exhales the red.

 

* * *

 

One day – one night – he does not know the difference – Cullen realizes he cannot move.  Red lyrium sprouts from his legs beneath the rags, stiffens up his joints.  He’s huddled in the corner, and the red creeps around him, its voice a chorus he can’t deny.

There’s a sound in the hall, something different, something strange.  He lifts his head slightly; it’s all he can do.  Even then he feels the strain, lyrium cracking in his flesh as he moves.  He draws another breath.  There’s a dull hope in his mind, and he does not know why.

A light flickers down the hall, a moving torch.  They won’t be taking him for interrogation anymore.  He tries to laugh, the sound mangled in his mouth.

Figures stop in front of his cell.  It takes time to organize their shadows into something that makes sense.  He squints in the dim light.  Then one of the figures speaks, and he realizes.

“Cullen?  Creators, Cullen –”

 _Her_  voice is soft and shocked and  _real_ , a  _real_  sound in his ears, not the pulse of lyrium, and Cullen shivers, paralyzed in the corner of his cell.

“Herald,” he whispers.  “You’re – you’re here.  You’ve come back.”  He stares weakly at her.  She hasn’t changed a day since the last time he saw her, and her face is snow-pale beneath her vallaslin.

“I didn’t know I was gone,” she says frantically.  “The magister – but what _happened_  to you?” she asks, and he thinks she may be crying.  She reaches out and grips the bars of his cell door.

“Don’t touch it!” Cullen snaps, for a moment remembering how she knew him.  _Commander._   She jumps back as if she’s been stung.  “It’s the –”  He swallows, tired by the outburst.  “The red lyrium.  It gets – inside.  The singing, Herald…”

She’s ignoring him, jabbing her dagger into the space between lock and bar, trying helplessly to open the door.  She lets out a growl of frustration before summoning a blast of cold air, directing it straight at the door.  Cullen winces at the sudden chill, but when she smashes clumsily at the lock with her dagger, it shatters.

“I’m getting you out of here,” she says, pushing open the door.  She kneels beside him, circles darkening beneath her eyes.  There are tears on her cheeks.  Her hands hover over his arms, as if she wants to touch him, but fears to.

“Don’t,” he grits out.  “You can’t.  I can’t move.”  He pulls a deep breath, the song pounding so loudly it is difficult to think.  “Please, Herald –”  He stares at her.  

Like this they’re eye to eye.  He’s never looked at her this way; she’d always been so much shorter.  A lifetime ago he remembers how shy and nervous she could make him feel, the joy one of her smiles used to bring him.  Maybe in a different world, they would have –

He coughs, choking on the grit of spreading red in his throat.  “Can you stop the _singing_  –”

“What do you want me to do?” she asks, breathing hard.  “I can’t heal something like this, Cullen, I’m so sorry.”

Cullen gazes at her, suddenly relieved.  “Nobody could.”  His gaze falls on the knife in her hand.  “End it.  All of it.  All of  _this_.”

The Herald’s face is gray and green now, sickened, horrified.  He wishes he could have seen her smile again.  Her mouth thins into a hard line instead, and she nods once.  “If you – if you ask it of me.  But only if you are  _certain_ –”

He tries to speak.  His voice cracks.  “Do not make me beg.”

The Herald’s face is soft, he thinks.  The expression – it takes him a moment to recognize it.  He does not remember it right away, with the song scrabbling in his head, the movement of her hands a distraction.  “I am so sorry,” she says again.

There’s a  _sharpness_  in his throat, and for a moment he thinks he’s drowning, drowning, in the flood of crimson.  He tries another breath but this one does not come.  He’s grateful.

 _Compassion_ , he thinks, that’s what her face wears, and as the darkness spreads, the song at last falls silent. 

**Author's Note:**

> An anon on tumblr really wanted me to write this one. I hope they are satisfied. I have to go sit down in the corner and cry now, personally...


End file.
